Naomi Ragen is an American-born novelist, playwright and journalist who has lived in Jerusalem since 1971. Naomi has written for the Jerusalem Post and other publications in Israel and abroad, as well as to her mailing list, about Israel and Jewish issues.

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Naomi's tenth novel The Devil in Jerusalem has been chosen by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency as the number one Jewish book of the season.
The story - inspired by true events - is a chilling tale of the paths that so easily lead us astray, and the darkness within us all.
Click the book’s cover to learn more.

Naomi has published ten internationally best-selling novels, and is the author of a hit play (Women's Minyan) that has been performed more than 500 times in Israel's National Theatre (Habimah) as well as in the United States and Argentina.
An Orthodox woman, feminist and iconoclast, Naomi is a tireless advocate for women's rights in Israel, waging a relentless campaign against domestic abuse and bias in rabbinical courts, as well as a successful Supreme Court case against gender segregation on Israeli buses.
With her tenth novel, The Devil in Jerusalem, Naomi continues her ground-breaking exploration of women in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world she began in 1989 with Jephte's Daughter, followed by Sotah and The Sacrifice of Tamar.
Naomi is a sought-after lecturer all over the world. If your group is interested in hosting Naomi, please click here.

May 2017 – The Polish translation of Devil in Jerusalem is published as Nic Nie Mów.

April 2017 – Naomi speaks about her books at the Ivan M. Stettenham Library at the Streicker Centre in New York City.

March 2017 – Naomi tours the Paris region to speak about her new book Les Soeurs Weiss, the French translation of The Sisters Weiss.

January 2017 – Naomi is interviewed by Valérie Abécasis on French Channel 24‘s Culture program. The interview (in French) begins at the 4:00 minute mark.

December 2016 – Les Soeurs Weiss, the French translation of The Sisters Weiss, is published.

7 October 2014 –
Naomi’s ninth novel, The Sisters Weiss, was published in paperback. It’s the story of two sisters from an ultra-Orthodox family in 1950s Brooklyn who take very different paths, and then find their lives unexpectedly intersecting again forty years later. To order the book from Amazon, click the book cover above.

December 2013 - Watch an interview (in French) with Naomi about her struggle against the haredi war on women in Israel.
Watch an interview (in French) with Naomi about Le Serment.
December 2013 - Naomi visited Île-de-France to promote her new book Le serment (the French translation of The Covenant).

15 March 2012 - Sotah was published in Italian as L'amora proibito. Read a
review (in Italian).March 2012 - Jephte's Daughter was published in an Italian paperback edition, as Una moglie a Gerusalemme.October 2011 - The Ghost of Hannah Mendes was published in French as Le Fantôme de Dona Gracia Mendes.
Read a
review (in French).October 2011 - The Tenth Song was published in paperback.
May 2011 - Four-time Tony nominee Tovah Feldshuh directed a staged reading of Women's Minyan at New York's Westside Theater. The reading was produced by One Circle Productions, in partnership with Safe Horizon.

November 2013 - The Covenant was published in French as Le serment.
November 2013 - Watch an interview with Naomi by Sharon Mor of Shaulina Productions about Naomi's new book The Sisters Weiss in Hebrew or in English.
6 November 2013 - Israel's Supreme Court reversed the District Court's decision against Naomi in the Sarah Shapiro case and ordered Shapiro to return the money she was awarded. Naomi agreed that the money be donated to charity.
October-November 2013 - Naomi toured the US, visiting twelve US cities and speaking about her new book, The Sisters Weiss.
October 2013 - Naomi's ninth novel, The Sisters Weiss, was published. Read an article about it in the San Diego Jewish World.
August 2013 - Chains Around the Grass was published in an Amazon Kindle edition. July 2013 - An interview with Naomi about her trips to Spain to research her best-selling The Ghost of Hannah Mendes was featured in Jewish Travel.
December 2012 - Naomi's play Women's Minyan was performed by the West Boca Theatre Company at the Levis JCC in Boca Raton, Florida.
November 2012 - Naomi visited Île-de-France speaking about her books.
5 November 2012 - Naomi spoke at the Cockfosters and North Southgate Synagogue in London, England.

Memorial Day – What We Have, What We Have Paid

by Naomi Ragen on May 1st, 2006

I dropped off some clothes at the dry cleaners in Davidka Square, and then crossed the street and started walking towards the shuk. As I walked, I looked at the people around me: an older couple speaking French, an Ethiopian mother, swathed in white, her face decorated by traditional facial tattoos, holding her child in her arms as she waited for the bus. A young couple, very trendy and lean, speaking an animated Russian. Israeli soldiers. A very, very elderly man in a colorful embroidered Bukharin skullcap. A young Muslim woman, swathed in a head covering and long dress in a lively blue, standing on line waiting to buy a falafel.

All this I saw within a block or two at the most. A tiny street, in the center of a tiny city in the Middle East, where conformity, intolerance and religious oppression are the norm. And yet, we Jews, through all our heartache, all our difficulties, all our inner strife, have managed to produce this little world full of contrasts, a lively pastiche of so many cultures and religions. We take the buses together, buy fast food together, work and play and pray together. And we do it in so many languages, dressed so differently.

And all of a sudden, I began to understand how I had made the transition from New Yorker to Middle Easterner with such relative ease: Jerusalem has the same dynamism, the same lively interflow of people from all over the world, the same tolerance, the same creativity and give and take as the greatest city, in the greatest country in the world.

It would be, under any circumstances, a remarkable achievement. Given the fact that it is a city that has been terrorized by constant bomb threats; a city whose citizens have been randomly targeted and murdered in their buses, their pizza parlors, and in their shopping areas; a city that has very little time off from standing guard to protect itself and its citizens from homicidal maniacs, it is a miracle.

When the siren sounded this evening in our city, ushering in the day of mourning for Israel’s fallen soldiers, I thought of who had paid the price for our liberty, and whose lives had stood at the ready to give us this beautiful city and country we are privileged to live in. I thought of my friends Sara and Michael Newman whose son Eitan lost his life two years ago as his tank blew up. I thought of the evening in his memory they had invited me to attend, and how the place overflowed with young people, who kept coming and coming. How the entire night had been spent singing songs, nothing sad. So many young people, Eitan’s friends, young families, who have not, will not, forget him; who will go on, singing, building, defending, creating.

There has never been, in the history of the Jewish people, a more courageous and admirable generation of young people.

There has never been, in the history of the Jewish people, a more amazing variety of Jewish life in the land that God gave us. The two of these things combined make me glad to be alive; glad to be a Jew; glad to be privileged to live in the land of the Jews, the land of Israel.

May God keep the souls of our soldiers who have fallen beneath His wings in Eden, until He returns them to their bodies at the end of time.